Tennessee

Imagine a city where every third man and woman is dressed in roper boots and ten-gallon hats. Bars with gaudy neon signs line the Main Street, bearing the names of stars of the Country music scene. Live music sails out of the windows of every floor. Every. Floor. A city where, despite its infamous popularity with bachelor and bachelorette parties, the folks still turn a welcoming smile on you and ask how you’re doin’. A city where, as the sun goes down, the streets seem to glitter with the reflected light off the rhinestone-studded outfits worn by revellers in the street.

This is Nashville. And it’s quite unexpectedly captured my heart.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that a self-described country boy with a habit of eschewing cities should find himself very much at home in the Music City where Country music is king. I am so glad I came here. And to think I didn’t even know much about the place beyond the occasional mention in the odd James Brown and Tina Turner number…! Thank you, Mackenzie, for opening my eyes to this wonder.

But hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s more to Nashville than just the frenetic delights of Broadway. First, let me take you on a detour to the strangest hotel I’ve ever seen: the Opryland Resort.

It might look like an enormous walk-in aviary, but it’s actually a vast hotel and spa complex. It’s free to explore, even if you’re not staying, but what a place…! It’s hard to know what is the most bizarre thing of all: the waterfall, the boat tours along the artificial river, the nods to American architecture (up to and including a distinctive New Orleans home) or the fact that all of this can be found within a gigantic glass-roofed building that looks like a recycled film set for Jurassic Park III.

Well, I did want to see the America that most casual tourists don’t get to see, and I’m not disappointed! Maybe I’ll be mad enough to spend the night here someday.

With our things stashed away in a much less outlandish (but nonetheless phenomenal) establishment, Mackenzie took me out onto Broadway for a bit of shopping ahead of a night bar-hopping and soaking in as much live music as a single night can offer. I’ll admit I was almost tempted to shell out on a pair of boots and/or a hat, but in the end I settled for a Country-style shirt. After all, it’s likely to get a little more mileage than the hat!

Kitted out in my new Nashville wear, we grabbed a couple of drinks at Luke’s 32 Bridge, where we met up with the rest of Mackenzie’s friends. One of the local bands was kicking up a storm on the roof with a couple songs I recognised. I’ve done my homework with this genre, which I confess is relatively new to me!

I caught myself singing along to Country Girl (Shake It For Me), Chicken Fried and Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy), all of which seem to be crowd favourites (and all of which have now found their way into my golden jukebox playlist on Spotify). More impressively still, they wound up their set for the evening with an almighty medley that included the one and only Play That Funky Music, the song I used to close gigs with back in my schooldays. And what a mashup…! Yes, I was taking notes! I might be on holiday, but I’d be a fool not to jot some ideas down for house music when it comes around.

We didn’t get any free drinks for the birthday hat, though birthday wishes were flying in from all directions from well-wishers on the street, which was sweet. The drinks we did get, though, were fantastic. It would be madness to come to Tennessee and leave without sampling the famous Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whisky, which I had in the form of a Fireball. Yum!

To quote Luke Bryan: I don’t want this night to end. But it did, like all good things do, and in the best possible way: with a little bit of chicken fried to share. I haven’t tried nearly enough of this Southern speciality, so I guess I’ll have to come back and remedy that someday.

Nashville is something else. If you’re even partially interested in good music, grab your boots and make a pilgrimage here as soon as you can. It’s got to be the most fun I’ve ever had in the city and that’s a fact.

Say, that tower looks like the Eiffel Tower. I wonder if that’s intentional. If that’s not a reminder from the universe that I need to spend some time in France this summer before teaching A Level French for the first time (God help me) then I don’t know what is!

See you again sometime, Nashville. I think I left a bit of my heart with you. BB x

Her father was a man “led by a star” as the natives say, and would follow it over the edge of the world and be no nearer.

Henry Rider Haggard, The Ghost Kings

We travel for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes you set out to see a place because you have a particular place in mind: maybe you heard about it somewhere, or saw it in a magazine, and need to see it with your own eyes. Sometimes it stems from a deep-seated desire to get away from home: “anywhere but here”. And sometimes, when the time is right, the driving force is beyond your control. It starts like a tide coming in, the waves rushing about your feet, warm and wonderful. Before you know it, the waters are racing back the way they came in a cascade of glittering sand and silt, pulling you into their wake, as though you’re standing upon the wake of a shooting star.

That is the force that has carried me here to Alabama. Something like it, anyway. It’s not exactly on the tourist trail. I’ve certainly not seen the Heart of Dixie appear in my social media feed over the years, whereas I dare say I’ve seen enough selfies in New York, Chicago and California to make like I’ve been there myself by now. But I do like to leave the beaten trail when I can. So here I am.

Independence Day found me on a boat in the Tennessee River, a mighty tributary of the mightier Mississippi, with a merry band of Americans celebrating their country’s national holiday the right way: beers in hand, country music blasting from the speakers, the immense American sky overhead, and the Stars and Stripes billowing out behind. I could hardly have asked for a more authentic way to celebrate the Fourth of July if I tried.

We spent almost all day out on the river, which may well account for the angry sunburn that has now morphed into one of the darkest tans I’ve had in years. Or maybe the burn came from standing in the wake of that shooting star, I can’t say. Either way, I had a lot of fun diving into the Tennessee River.

Some sights are so beautiful that you daren’t get too close, afraid that even the lightest touch might drive you mad, but I couldn’t leave America without some kind of contact with one of the two-hundred and fifty daughters of that legendary river that drains the entire continent of North America. Incidentally, it’s almost certainly the first time I’ve ever swum in a river. What a way to break a habit!

My host, the wonderful Mackenzie, had one all-American experience after another to throw my way. After watching the Fourth of July fireworks in a parking lot in downtown Huntsville, she took me to a diner for a proper American-style brunch of sweet tea with biscuits and gravy – consider me converted! – followed by a visit to Target, America’s legendary superstore, where I was amazed by the low cost of clothing. And to top it all off, we went to a baseball game at the local stadium between the Birmingham Barons and the local team, the Huntsville Trash Pandas.

Baseball – at least to this outsider – seems to be more of an event than a game. Nine innings across nearly three hours of play, broken up by a stream of events intended to involve the audience. Along with the opening national anthem, I clocked a kids’ race against the mascot, a couple of singalongs with a hype man and the sparkly cheerleaders, a cabezudo-style “space race” in support of a local enterprise and even a dance-off… all to keep your attention throughout the marathon experience.

With all that going on and more, I was very distracted, so I can’t say I’m any the more familiar with how baseball works, but it was such an incredible experience!

The fireworks after the game were even more spectacular than those that were set off the night before, which really is something – though deserved, perhaps, given that it was the home team that took home the win. The spectacle lasted a full twenty minutes, which is about as long as it took to leave the car park after the game. Everyone left in a mad scramble via the two exits to the car park, creating a logjam that went on for ages. One stereotype is true: America is a country that has yet to learn how to queue properly.